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Let My People Go! – The History and Historicity of the Biblical Account of the Exodus

Khalid Elhassan May 31, 2025 17 min

10. Egyptian Accounts

The Expulsion of the Hyksos, 1906. Imgur

Support for the Hyksos Expulsion Theory also comes from Manetho, a third century BC Egyptian priest and historian, whose writings are preserved in fragments by later historians such as Josephus. According to Manetho, a group of leprous, impure people were expelled from Egypt and settled in Jerusalem.

Josephus, writing in the first century AD, linked this account to the Exodus and vigorously defended the Jewish account against Manetho’s negative portrayal. Some scholars argue that Manetho’s story is a distorted Egyptian memory of the Hyksos expulsion, perhaps merged with later Egyptian experiences of Semitic foreigners. If so, it supports the idea that Egyptian and Israelite traditions preserved different versions of the same event.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.